Ajit Pai Thanks Congress For Helping Him Kill Net Neutrality Rules (arstechnica.com)

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai today thanked Congress for preventing the U.S. government from enforcing net neutrality rules. "The Pai-led Federal Communications Commission repealed Obama-era net neutrality rules, but the repeal could have been reversed by Congress if it acted before the end of its session," reports Ars Technica. "Democrats won a vote to reverse the repeal in the Senate but weren't able to get enough votes in the House of Representatives before time ran out." From the report: "I'm pleased that a strong bipartisan majority of the U.S. House of Representatives declined to reinstate heavy-handed Internet regulation," Pai said in a statement marking the deadline passage today. Pai claimed that broadband speed improvements and new fiber deployments in 2018 occurred because of his net neutrality repeal -- although speeds and fiber deployment also went in the right direction while net neutrality rules were in place. "Over the past year, the Internet has remained free and open," Pai said, adding that "the FCC's light-touch approach is working." Pai didn't mention a recent case in which CenturyLink temporarily blocked its customers' Internet access in order to show an ad or a recent research report accusing Sprint of throttling Skype (which Sprint denies).

Comments

Thanks

[110010001000]

A little extra in your pay packet this week!

free and open

[zlives]

fuck you pai, and the congress you rode in on

Re:free and open

[PixetaledPikachu]

Does anyone know of a website like Slashdot but without all the whiny little bitches? Seriously, where are the people that enjoy life and actually thrive? People that are grateful for what they have and see each day as a gift. WHERE ARE THEY?

You're clicking an article about politics and net neutrality expecting those?

Only Tell Me When He Is In Jail!

[HannethCom]

The only thing I want to hear about that piece of crap is when he has been tossed in jail. I don't think it will happen, but Ajit Pai lied under oath in court and that is a criminal offense.

Re:Only Tell Me When He Is In Jail!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's only a criminal offense for second-class citizens like you and me.

People like Pai are not held to such standards.

Don't hold your breath about him going to jail....I am being completely serious.

Re: Only Tell Me When He Is In Jail!

[houghi]

We luve in a world where people can lie and novody cares. They can even tell the truth and nobody cares.
He could say "I have taken bribes." Nothing woud happen.

Re: Only Tell Me When He Is In Jail!

[Hodr]

Well that's just not true. The IRS would ask for their cut.

Re:Is there some reason

[DaHat]

And do what? Create a resolution which will die in the Senate? Hell, the last time the Senate voted on a related resolution they were opposed to NN: https://www.congress.gov/bill/...

GOP

[meglon]

Fucking over US citizens every chance they get.

Re:GOP

[JaredOfEuropa]

Not really. The real problem is that most ISPs are not satisfied anymore to just pipe the internet into our home like any plumber, they also want to get into the content game. And as soon as that happens, there’s an incentive to promote your own crap over similar content from other providers. And in any case there’s the temptation of letting someone pay you to give them preferred service, allowing you to collect from both consumers and hosts. We (still) have plenty of providers to choose from here, but they were getting ready to do all that, before our parliament voted in net neutrality. One of them tries and sees what they can get away with, then the rest of them follows suit. A race to the bottom.

Re:GOP

[dgatwood]

The reason we have cable monopolies is because local governments awarded monopoly service contracts. Usually they granted the monopoly in exchange for coverage guarantees - to insure that low-income areas weren't excluded from cable and Internet service.

They did the same thing for telephone. But you're badly mistaken if you believe that removing monopolies will result in competition. Countless towns have tried that over the years, and essentially 100% of the time, they were back to a monopoly within about five years.

Why is this the case? Because wire infrastructure is something economists call a natural monopoly — a product or service in which the startup costs are so high and the payoff over such a long period of time that competition is infeasible.

When a new company comes into a territory with an existing cable company, the new company has to have some way of inducing people to switch — either by lowering their cost or by providing better service. Either way, it is very easy for the existing company to match their offer, because they have paid for their infrastructure, and almost all of their income is profit. So the existing company invariably either matches or undercuts the newcomer and provides enough improvements to their service so that the newcomer cannot steal enough subscribers to cover the payments on their construction costs plus operating expenses.

What happens then? Unless the local government decides to bail out the newcomer to keep competition going, the newcomer typically sells the infrastructure to the older cable company for little more than what they still owe on it, thus giving the incumbent a set of new replacement lines at significantly below cost. And you're back to a monopoly.

That's why, with the possible exception of extremely high-density areas where a new company can get by on a tiny percentage of residents/businesses, the only places where competition has ever really succeeded have been places that have had two or more competing companies since the dawn of cable TV, and even those usually break down to a monopoly eventually.

This is a problem that cannot be solved no matter what you do. Wire infrastructure is simply too expensive to allow for competition in practice. Heck, wireless infrastructure is almost too expensive in most places, forget wired.

The only way to get real competition in Internet service is to separate the wire provider from the actual Internet service provider. In practice, this can happen in one of two ways, both of which involve the government:

• Governments can create regulations that require incumbent cable or fiber providers to lease access to their competitors at a reasonable rate.
• Governments can build out a fiber infrastructure and then lease access to any ISP that wants to provide service over those fibers. Governments can optionally spin off the resulting fiber provider as a nonprofit corporation with a mandate to lease access to any ISP at a reasonable rate.

Either way, the result is the same: You have one company or organization providing wire service for multiple ISPs. When you do this, competition is possible at the ISP level. In practice, though, the second approach (government-built infrastructure) tends to work better in the long run, for two reasons:

• Incumbent providers who own the lines tend to do only minimum maintenance on lines that are in use by other companies, resulting in two companies blaming each other for poor service, and the customer having no real recourse.
• Those sorts of laws typically apply only to a given technology, and have to be constantly updated as the technology changes, or else they become useless. After all, we had such a law for ADSL, but the phone companies then ran fiber out to remote terminals to provide ADSL2 service, and wouldn't lease those fibers, so only the phone company could provide the faster ADSL2 service. And once you switched over, they would cut the existi

Congress should make net neutrality law

[melted]

Congress should make net neutrality law of the land. It's insane that the FCC (an unelected body) had the authority for something like that to begin with.

Re:Congress should make net neutrality law

[Anonymous Coward]

The actual result was 35.8%. The previous year it was 22%. The interesting aspect of that is it's based upon speed results by a company that measures speed tests. That alone makes it biased since people who upgrade their connection are more likely to run a speedtest vs those who don't upgrade to not running said test. Of course people who are new to broadband will also be more likely to run a speedtest, but the number of people new to broadband may not be increasing rapidly. Finally, speedtests are precisely the sort of thing that net neutrality rules would be designed to prevent being gamed by granting them higher priority to create the appearance of improved performance vs actual average performance.

In short, I'd like to see a more systematic measure of speed from a variety of metrics that in aggregate could be used to measure actual broadband penetration, speed, etc. It's not enough to read a news article linking to one website's numbers and accept it as fact any more than I'd trust Steam statistics as fact.

Re:Congress should make net neutrality law

[dgatwood]

So - Internet speeds are increasing after NN is overturned. How is this bad for the consumer, again?

Speeds to speed test servers are increasing faster after NN is overturned, but those have little relation to actual Internet speeds. They represent best-case speed, rather than typical speed, because no ISP would be stupid enough to throttle connections to a speed test server. But actual average speeds may or may not be increasing any faster than they were before.

Also, by focusing on average speed, you're missing the whole point of net neutrality. It isn't about the average. It's about the worst case. It's about ensuring that ISPs aren't extorting companies who aren't their customers, about ensuring that ISPs don't artificially degrade performance on specific services like video-on-demand or VoIP to drive customers to their own competing services, and so on. That can't be measured using average bandwidth. At all.

To use a car analogy, saying that average Internet speeds increased after the repeal of NN is roughly like saying speed limits increased after overturning a law that prevents illegal speed traps.

Re:Congress should make net neutrality law

[SirAstral]

" If you can bend the rules to insure a more moral outcome"

This is what is called using fuzzy logic to justify whatever outcome you choose. Your morals do not match other peoples morals. If you swear to follow the Constitution and then spend time bending it, then you are obviously intentionally breaching your oath and intentionally betraying The People. The moment you start down this path you are corrupt.

The proper process is to uphold that constitution and seek to legally amend the document to match your morals and go through the proper process to see if enough folks agree with your morals. Otherwise you only justify the concept of wiping your ass with it just like those blatantly disregarding it. You know just exactly what you were doing when you starting trying to BEND it in the first place. Acting otherwise clearly indicates that you are more than willing to become a hypocrite about the issue.

There are lots of things everyone disagrees on in the Constitution, but under no circumstances can it be allowed to be trampled for political or moral expediency with rending it completely useless as it has been rendered now. The list of usurpations and abuses of power are more than long and varied enough to make it clear we are potentially or uncomfortably close to just one flash point away from a catastrophic breakdown of our entire society. There are innocent & decent people rotting in the system and no one much cares. Many people are going to vote in a corrupt person regardless of party because now its all about the tribe and making sure your tribe wins at the expense of your fellow citizens.

Re:Congress should make net neutrality law

[SirAstral]

It is hard to discuss things like this with folks like you because you are so full of fallacies and ignorance it hurts. The time it takes to point them all out are more than I care to tackle so I will only go after the most glaring. To be honest you practically need an entire day of introduction to basic logic and how to avoid holding contrary values.

"If congress betrays the people and passes an immoral and unjust law the people don't want, it is not a betrayal of the people nor is it corrupt to ignore it."

This is a strawman fallacy. "The Law" and the "Consitution" are very different things, but apparently you are not capable of understanding that. The Law is just a bunch of rules enforced on people. The constitution is a founding document that gives those "rule writers and enforcers" their authority. Without it, they have no "agreed upon" authority. "We The People" are America... NOT THE GOVERNMENT but you don't seem to understand that. And if you are okay with using your strawman fallacy to deconstruct my point then you are also making the claim that your version of morals are superior to the constitution and that you should be allowed to judge who is a slave or human or having any rights.

"If congress betrays the people and passes an immoral and unjust law the people don't want, it is not a betrayal of the people nor is it corrupt to ignore it."

That is the real hyperbole here. Just because YOU don't like a law they pass does not mean they betrayed anyone. If they pass a law you don't like your job is to get the law changed, NOT IGNORE IT, otherwise you are clearly promoting anarchy the opposite of being civil! If you are going to run around justifying that it is okay to break the law because you disagree with it then so can everyone else for their own petty reasons as well. After all.. why is YOUR understanding of morals so-called superior to a common thugs understanding of it or the law for that matter? Where is your authority for this judgement?

"You seem to claim there is something wrong with innocent and decent people rotting in the system... yet the constitution allows much of it."

That document does NOT allow for it. It is the constant breach of it that is allowing it, get your facts straight.

"In many cases the laws putting them there have been duly passed, and are enforced as written."

This is the REAL show of your ignorance and how contradictory and ignorant you are. Which is is? Where they duly passed or are they betraying you? If as you said "massively corrupt" then it is not possible for them to also be "in many cases...duly passed' So you either do not know what duly means or you are clearly not capable of keeping your own view points of of conflict with each other!

"The constitution does not provide a solution to the current systemic malignancy,"

that's what voting is for... if you and the rest of your fellow voters are as ignorant as you, then THAT is why you think there is no solution.

"if anything, one could argue that it was flawed at its inception that it allowed us to get here."

I suppose you are the only one among us without flaws... This reeks of a nasty God complex. The Constitution "with all of its flaws" is likely better than anything you could put together in a lifetime. You can't even survive one post without a bunch of conflicting view points.

"Partisan / Tribalism should never have been allowed to infiltrate the process for approving judges, or justice department officials."

EVERYTHING IS TRIBAL!! It is human nature, just being pro follow the law vs becoming anarchist in moral outrage is also tribal. You are espousing a tribal view in your bitching and moaning against them!

I espouse "follow the law" not because of tribalism but because if you say ignore it then you cannot justify punishing those that break it for their morals either. That is a hypocrisy and hypocrisy like that not far away from murder, because many time such hypocrisy has been used to justify "dehumaniz

Re:Congress should make net neutrality law

[JoePete]

It's insane that the FCC (an unelected body) had the authority for something like that to begin with.

You're making Pai's point. Congress should be the one who determines the extent to which ISPs should be regulated - not the FCC. Arguably, Congress already weighed in on this with the 1996 Telecommunications Act when it left broadband ISPs out of the category of "common carrier" (i.e. Title II) and subject to neutrality regulation. It was only in 2008 that the FCC, acting on its own, muscled in and told Comcast to stop throttling traffic. Comcast sued the FCC and won under the premise that the FCC did not have the authority to regulate broadband ISPs. So after being taken to task by an appeals court, the FCC responds in 2010 by adopting formal rules for regulating ISPs. This time Verizon sues them on the same basis - the FCC does not have the authority to adopt such rules. An appeals court again rules that the FCC is in the wrong because it is treating broadband ISPs as common carriers when in fact they have never been categorized as such. So in 2015, the FCC figures it out; it will just unilaterally categorize all ISPs as common carriers and thus subject to neutrality principles. This wasn't a Congressional Act. This was three (out of five) unelected commissioners that most Americans had never heard of voting to give themselves pretty significant regulatory power. In 2017, now with Pai as chair, they vote 3 to 2 repeal the rules.

All that the net neutrality debate has proven is that most Americans know little about Internet traffic and even less about their own government. Listen, if you love the Democrat-Republican blood bath that we are treated to hourly, by all means, continue to shout and stomp and advocate for more political fighting. If you believe in solving problems, I suggest picking up a copy of Magruder's American Government and walking into your city or town hall on occasion. You do realize, for example, that all that coax and fiber strung on the poles in your city or town is only there through a municipal contract with these service providers. And just like there are alternatives to Democrats and Republicans, there are alternatives to Comcast and Verizon. Sure, satellite, WiMax and other options may be expensive, but that is economics; sometimes you have to pay for quality. But the last thing any rational American should want is giving more power to a federal government that functions with all the maturity of two spoiled, out-of-touch brats constantly having a slap fight.

Re:Is there some reason

[Kernel Kurtz]

The vote was 52-47 in the senate.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

Granted it would be easier in the house and harder in the senate next time around.

Don't thank Congress

[rsilvergun]

thank the GOP. There have been a few votes to save Net Neutrality and they were lost along party lines (a few GOPers did break ranks but it wasn't enough).

I know folks don't like partisanship, but there are partisan issues and NN is one of them. Had Trump lost the election we wouldn't be reading this story today. Had the Democrats taken the Senate & House by a wide enough majority to override vetos we would be reading about the upcoming vote to restore NN. These aren't debatable points, they're just facts. Cold, hard facts.

We've got another election in about 2 years. Show up at your primary. The Dems have a wing that refuses corporate PAC money. If Net Neutrality matters to you then you know what to do.

job security

[renegade600]

he was really thanking congress for helping him secure an extremely high paying job for when he leaves government service.

Re:Known lying faggot Lyinwood here to obfuscate

[Zontar The Mindless]

RTFS. A couple of them are listed there.

Net Nuetrality hasn't been replealed yet

[rsilvergun]

there's still numerous lawsuits going on. I can't believe I have to even say this on /., but the downsides are:

a. Price increases. ISP will leverage their control of the pipes to charge us more for services like on demand video.

b. Censorship. Again, ISP no longer have to treat all packets equally. That means if they don't like the Alt-Right (or the left) they can ban them.

c. No innovation. Small players won't even be able to get started because they won't be able to afford the bandwidth fees.

d. No more ala cart streaming services. No More cord cutting. It's only NN that made these possible. Say goodbye to Netflix, Crunchyroll and Youtube. Even the big guys won't be able to compete when the ISPs can charge them but not you. Same thing happened with Microsoft. Nobody could compete with them because they could leverage their defacto monopoly.

If I may digress for a moment longer: This is a constant thing I hear on the right and I'm fucking sick of it. To wit:

"We don't need this regulation to stop a bad thing because the bad thing is not happening".

It's like saying Murder can be legal because nobody I know got murdered this week. It's nonsensical and in any other aspect of life folks would call it out as bullshit. But there's a multi million dollar propaganda machine trying to get folks to distrust and hate regulation in general so the rich and powerful can splay us open and gut us like fish. And we're bloody god damned letting it happen.

Re:let's not forget

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets also not forget the entire story. Obama was required to nominate someone the republicans would accept due to the FCC commissioners having to have a 3:2 split.

Re:Is there some reason

[Actually, I do RTFA]

It would have to be phrased slightly differently. Prior to now, Congress could pass an "LOL, No" bill in response to Pei's specific decision, just undoing it (the timelimit on an LOL, No bill just expired). This would have to be a longer bill, that fully explained what Pei the FCC had to do. It would probably also either be screwable with by Pei, or be so firm that the FCC couldn't adapt it in the future when the invariable loophole was found. Also, because it was a new rule, not an LOL, No bill, there's probably a gap in time before implementation, as opposed to the instant application of "LOL, No"

The legal name for the "LOL, No" bill is the "Congressional Review Act" if you want to learn more

Re:Muh Bandwidth wuz STRANGLED!

[dgatwood]

Every time I see these 'net neutrality' things all I can think about is Idiocracy and the 'its got electrolytes' bit, and the NN version of the same is 'muh bandwidth wuz stranglified'.

Competition in a zero sum environment:

The total bandwidth available is not short time frame elastic, its completely static. So an example for sake of argument under the imposed 'bad' NN rules the 'muh bandwidth wuz stranglified' people keep pushing for: Netflix in North America uses 50%(whatever the real number is doesn't matter) of available bandwidth and pays the same as everyone else under that rule, ISP/trunking/peering companies are unable to charge them more by the imposed rules. Along comes SUPERNetflix with double goodness and 4X the bandwidth use which everyone starts using because double is mo gooderer, and now they use say 99% of the available bandwidth and the same ISP/trunking/peering companies (yes these numbers are exaggerated) are unable to charge more or negotiate a throttling plan due to the imposed rules.

The net result is all internet traffic is essentially throttled down to a max of 1% and the ISP is handcuffed, unable to charge for fair use, or throttle in the best interest of its customers.

Actually, you're wrong on pretty much every count here. For any sufficiently large ISP, Netflix will *give* the ISP a caching box for their data center that will take the vast majority of Netflix traffic entirely off of the upstream pipes. The only cost to them, other than the electricity to power the box and the cost of square footage to house it, is the cost of upgrading the infrastructure from the central office to the customer, which is usually a matter of upgrading the equipment at both ends. And given how often customer premises equipment fails and has to be replaced, it is usually just a matter of upgrading the equipment at the head end. In other words, it is highly short-term elastic.

And even if an ISP doesn't have that arrangement, nobody runs only a single fiber anywhere, so in practice, there is *always* extra fiber capacity available for upgrading the connection between two ISPs.

So the only way you would see the problems you're describing is if an ISP like Comcast gets too big for its britches and insists that Netflix pays a monthly fee to put that caching box in their data center, and then refuses to upgrade the peering point between the ISP's network and Netflix's ISP's network. Which it did. And their mutual customers got screwed, mainly because Comcast thought that throttling Netflix (and only Netflix) would cause more people to buy video-on-demand content from Comcast. And obviously it worked, or else they would have quickly discontinued that experiment.

Short of some sort of regulatory penalty against Comcast and similar ISPs when they pull these shenanigans, nothing will change. Net neutrality was an attempt to use the FCC's regulatory powers to do so. Unfortunately, because their interpretation of the law was purely a regulatory position rather than an explicit piece of legislation, it was subject to the whims of a given administration, and went away when the administration did.

"Criminal Thanks Other Criminals For Help"

[RonVNX]

Fixed that headline for ya.

Re: Muh Bandwidth wuz STRANGLED!

[Dynedain]

The ISP doesnâ(TM)t connect directly to Netflix and has no financial arrangement with Netflix. The ISP pays their backbone provider for the unbalanced data coming into the ISPâ(TM)s network. Netflix offered free caching servers so the ISPs could reduce their bandwidth on the backbone and peering agreements, directly reducing their costs. Why wouldnâ(TM)t they take it? Oh, right, because online video services are a threat to the legacy cable TV goose that is reaching menopause and no longer laying golden eggs.

Re:Muh Bandwidth wuz STRANGLED!

[Rhipf]

So an example for sake of argument under the imposed 'bad' NN rules the 'muh bandwidth wuz stranglified' people keep pushing for:
Netflix in North America uses 50%(whatever the real number is doesn't matter) of available bandwidth and pays the same as everyone else under that rule, ISP/trunking/peering companies are unable to charge them more by the imposed rules.

The problem with this statement is that Netflix doesn't pay "the same as everyone else under that rule". They pay a hell of a lot more than I do for Internet access. If Netflix somehow managed to use 99% of the Internet bandwidth that means that 99% of the traffic requests on the Internet are coming from people who wanting Netfix content. Those people are paying their ISP for that requested traffic.
ISPs asking Netflix to pay so they aren't throttled won't make any difference to those 99% requesting Netflix content (other than it will take longer for them to access that content if Netflix doesn't pay). All that will happen is that the 1% of requested traffic will be able to access that content faster (assuming that the other 99% don't decide to move to another service that will then also take up 99% of bandwidth). The only thing that will be accomplished is that your ISP will make more money and be able to start a competing service to Netflix that isn't throttled.